Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

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Keyes: Marriage Equality Leads to Communism, Slaughter

Alan Keyes seems to have found a comrade-in-arms in Stan Solomon. He’s been on his show several times and delivered some breathtaking rants about almost everything. In his latest appearance, he said that letting gays get married will lead to communism, the seizing of all private property, and the “murder of the masses.”

It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from, and it is the whole point of the push for homosexual marriage and homosexual rights. The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hardheaded, calculating, leftist, Communist, totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do. If you want to tolerate abuses then those abuses can be imposed upon the people. Once you establish that, the abuses are then not going to be confined to egregious outrages like this; those abuses are going to be committed against the whole society and they will in the end include the murder of the masses as has occurred in all Communist regimes that existed. That includes as well the expropriation of all property because if you don’t respect the primordial God-endowed belongings that are associated with family life then why on earth would you be constrained to respect any other form of human property claim.

Funny, that’s pretty much the same thing the nutballs said about equal rights for black people too.

He doesn’t know what “communism” means – he just uses it as a bad word. He could just as meaningfully substitute “shitty” and his commentary would have no semantic change. In other words, our mistake is thinking that we understand what he’s saying. His mistake is thinking he’s saying anything at all.

It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from…

Yeah, gay marriage was legal and universal back in the dark ages when the British and French empires were exploring the world and spawning the Enlightenment. So the American colonists had to come here to get away from it. Then they had to secede from the British Empire because, after they legalized gay marriage, they were about to get even more radical and — based on the notion that “once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do” — abolish the slave trade, thus depriving good Christian plantation-owning entrepreneurs of their “primordial God-endowed belongings that are associated with family life.”

I kinda like that phrase — “primordial God-endowed belongings that are associated with family life.” Like God made my Prius out of the primordial ooze (is there any of that left these days?) just for me. Or at least that’s what I could have told the bank when they called me about a late payment…

“then why on earth would you be constrained to respect any other form of human property claim”

Because I try to avoid thinking in binaries?

Because I apply heuristics that are tested against reality filters (outcome checking)?

Because gays having the same legal rights that my wife and I do has literally nothing to do with the title to my car or house?

Because I don’t need god’s huge manly endowment to keep me from going nuts? (I’m open tomorrow night if god would like to show up with his manly huge endowment although if the past is any guide, I’m way to staid to go nuts completely).

It must be frustrating to be an all-powerful deity who can create a universe out of scratch in six days but just can’t seem to stop men from putting their peepees in other men. Do all gays have iron chariots, or something?